Can't Hurry Love

by Melinda Curtis

  “I want the best.” Barbara crumpled a tissue in one hand. She held a blue velvet drawstring bag in the other. “That’s why I’m here. The best doesn’t come quickly.”

  She was right about that.

  If Barbara was in the mood to buy, Lola could be in the mood to sell, especially with a commission involved. She led them to the showroom, which was lined with more caskets, urns, and headstones than Happy Motors had cars in its used-car lot. “I don’t want to overwhelm you with options.” They’d start with the easy stuff. “Are you thinking burial or cremation?”

  “Burial. Top-of-the-line casket. Top-of-the-line interior. Top-of-the-line headstone.” Barbara rattled off her demands like a general directing his troops through an important drill. “Visitation beginning during business hours and extending into the evening. I want real food, none of those store-bought cookies.”

  So much for the easy stuff.

  The mayor tried to inject some sanity into the equation. “Barb—”

  “Slideshow. A printed color program on quality paper stock.” Barbara jerked from beneath Kevin’s arm. “There needs to be a string quartet. Hymns. Eulogies. Prayer.”

  Kevin lifted a hand to draw Barbara back but thought better of it. His arm fell to his side. “Your mother didn’t believe in God, honey.”

  “It’s the right thing to do,” Barbara snapped, moving to stand apart from them. “When you run for governor, do you want people to look back and say you’re a devoted family man? Or do you want them to look at Mom’s passing and wonder if you considered her a nuisance, because we skimped on everything?”

  Lola wanted to disappear into the paneling so they could fight without an audience.

  “Marcia wrote her wishes in a will.” Kevin’s tone was as gentle as a morning breeze. His expression as compassionate as a minister’s. If he ever retired from public service, he had all the skills to work in the bereavement industry. “We should get it out of her safe-deposit box and read it.”

  “No.” Barbara slashed her hand through the air. “I know exactly how to produce this.”

  “We don’t have to do this today,” Lola said. If this was how the session was going to go, she’d prefer her bosses handle all the drama.

  “Oh, we’ll do this today.” The edge returned to Barbara’s voice, sharp enough to cut. Her eyes roved the showroom, seemingly without seeing anything. “I can’t do it tomorrow. I’m working. I have seven clients coming in. It’s bad enough I had to let Sheree cover for me today. Give clients one reason to leave, and they go elsewhere.”

  “Baby, your mother just died. You need to take time off.” Kevin came to Barbara’s side and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

  Barbara’s shoulders sagged, and her face tilted heavenward but she said nothing.

  Meanwhile, Lola thanked heaven for Kevin’s presence. Without him, this would be a raging fiasco.

  Kevin’s phone rang. He checked the display and then lowered the phone but didn’t put it away, clearly torn.

  Barbara sighed. “If it’s Frank, you need to answer it. I don’t care if you were friends when you were seventeen or how much money he has—you can’t let him buy and demolish downtown.” When he hesitated, she shooed him away. “Go, please.”

  Kevin took the call, drifting back to the lobby and speaking quietly.

  “Men.” Barbara gave Lola a watery smile. “I’m barely holding it together, and when Kevin tries to be supportive, it just makes me want to shatter. I can’t be weak. I’ve got a business to run and the wife of the mayor’s office to uphold.”

  Lola wasn’t aware the wife of the mayor had an office.

  “I mean, if I broke down, I’d end up doing something rash, like you and those window displays.” Barbara wiped her nose with a tissue. “People expect more from me. My mother expected more from me. Someday, I’m going to be First Lady.” She said it with complete confidence.

  The scary part was Lola believed her.

  “Let’s look at caskets.” Lola walked deeper into the showroom. The farther she went, the higher the price, and the more lucrative her time with Barbara would be. “I didn’t know your mother personally but this seems like something you’d want to consider.” She opened the casket. “This is our ultra-premium unit. Eighteen-gauge steel, beveled edges, hand-waxed teal powder finish, diamond-tuck rose interior in satin, eternal-rest reclining couch base and matching pillow, triple-rose embroidery above the head position.” It had everything but a TV remote.

  Barbara clung to the side of the casket as if it were the edge of the deep end of a pool and she couldn’t swim. “She was so young. She hadn’t even gone through menopause yet. She had me in high school, you know.”

  Lola hadn’t known.

  “Daddy was twenty years older than she was.” Barbara shook the casket. “Why did this happen? We were supposed to go to dinner in Greeley tonight.” She bowed her head. “She’s had a rough year. The doctor said she was depressed. What did she have to be blue about?”

  “I couldn’t say.” A strange feeling was taking hold of Lola—the impulse to comfort Barbara with a touch or a hug.

  “Not that it was suicide.” Barbara lifted her head to stare at Lola, perhaps to see whether Lola thought it might have been.

  “No one said it was.” Had it been? Marcia’s body would tell the tale even if Barbara didn’t.

  There was an uncomfortable silence but since Barbara was so upset, it didn’t last long.

  “What am I going to do?” wailed Barbara. “We were so close. She was my room mother all through elementary school. She was my cheerleading coach. She judged the debate team. My friends all loved her. She gave up everything for me.” Barbara turned tear-filled red eyes to Lola. Her lips trembled, and she looked like she might crumple.

  Lola gave in to impulse and hugged her. It was one of the most uncomfortable hugs ever. Quick. Awkward. With a hint of unwashed body odor—Barbara’s.

  “This casket is perfect,” Barbara said into the ensuing void. “The lining will match her skin tone.” She drew herself up and held her head high as a tear rolled down her cheek. “You’ll do her hair and makeup because…because…”

  “It’s my job.” And from the horrified look on Barbara’s face, she loathed the idea of doing it herself.

  “I want to get her something nice to wear. A power suit or a nice sheath dress and matching jacket.” Barbara wiped at her eyes with the remains of her tissue. “Is it all right if I bring that in tomorrow?”

  “We have a few days, depending upon when they can do her”—Lola almost said autopsy but thought better of it—“final procedure. You can also bring in any personal items you want her buried with. And a picture would help me with her final preparations.”

  “I have pictures in here.” Barbara handed Lola the small blue velvet bag. “She had blue streaks in her hair up until last year. She said it was because she liked to set herself apart from the crowd but I think she was having a midlife crisis.” Barbara stared at her hands. “I stopped letting my colorist put blue in her hair a year ago. I thought a change would do her good. Was I wrong?”

  “I couldn’t say.” But Lola was thinking yes.

  “I don’t want her to look like the pictures,” Barbara continued as if Lola hadn’t spoken. “No bright makeup. No funky hair colors. I want her to look like the mother of a First Lady.”

  No way! “No problem.” What Barbara was asking was wrong. Marcia hadn’t been the staid and stuffy type.

  But disappointing this client? That was a scary thought.

  “Her wedding ring is in there too. She didn’t wear it anymore, and she’d probably kill me for burying her with it on but Daddy died years and years ago so technically it’s the right thing to do.” Barbara heaved a sigh and kept babbling. “She and Daddy fought like wolves but they loved each other, and he did leave her a life insurance policy big enough that she could retire early.”

  Marcia had been lucky her husband hadn’t left that insurance money to his m
other, like Randy had.

  “And there’s a pearl ring in there she was fond of,” Barbara was saying. She glanced over her shoulder toward the door and then leaned in to whisper, “She had a special someone for years. He gave it to her two Christmases ago. She never told me who she was seeing. I always imagined he was someone incredibly romantic. He made her so happy.”

  A pearl ring. A secret man.

  The hair on the back of Lola’s neck went up, along with her suspicions.

  She was wrong, of course. There was the age difference. Since Barbara and Randy had been in the same class in high school, Marcia had literally been old enough to be his mother. When Lola had suspected Randy of having an affair with an older woman because of the clip-on earring, she hadn’t thought she’d be that much older. She’d pictured someone pushing forty who’d never pierced her ears. An eight-year age difference, max.

  But still…a pearl ring.

  “Honey.” Kevin entered the room and put his arm around his wife again. “I think that’s enough for one day.”

  Rigid in his arms, Barbara stared at the casket.

  Lola murmured her agreement and then reassured Barbara that she’d get the paperwork started and call about casket availability. They rarely sold stock off the showroom floor, and Barbara probably wouldn’t accept it if they did.

  With fits and starts and soft reassurances, Kevin managed to escort Barbara out.

  Lola shut the front door behind them and then sat on the green burlap couch in the lobby, staring at the blue velvet bag.

  When he was younger, Randy had slept with two knockouts—Avery and Mary Margaret. And Lola wasn’t exactly chopped liver in the looks department either. By comparison, Marcia was…not bland, but a different cup of tea. And older.

  Randy and Marcia?

  There was no way that was true.

  Yet there was only one way to find out.

  She opened the drawstring bag and dumped the contents onto the couch cushion. Simple clip-on pearl earrings. A simple diamond band. And a simple ring with a fleur-de-lis to either side of the pearl. A pretty ring. A familiar ring.

  Nana’s ring.

  Lola fell forward onto her knees, trying to breathe, trying to pretend she was wrong.

  Randy and Marcia had been lovers.

  She’d prefer to believe he’d had a deep friendship with Marcia, like Mims claimed to have had with Charlie. But Randy hadn’t had female friends.

  Things Barbara had said about her mother swam through the muck in Lola’s head. “She was depressed…She had a special someone for years. He gave it to her two Christmases ago…He made her so happy.” And the depression had started about a year ago, around the time Randy had died. Randy, whose favorite color was blue, the color Marcia liked to put in her hair. When combined with the pearl ring, the pieces fit.

  “Oh, Randy.”

  Now Lola knew why Marcia had avoided talking to her, why Marcia turned the other way when she saw Lola. It had nothing to do with Barbara and everything to do with Lola being married to Randy.

  Lola felt so inadequate. Her husband had been having an affair with an older woman.

  Her insides twisted. She could understand Randy falling for a beautiful woman. She could understand him falling for a woman who stocked the contents of the garage-apartment bureau. But the age difference…

  How could this have happened? They’d been newlyweds. He’d seemed so happy.

  Unless Drew was right and Randy’s affair with Marcia pre-dated her marriage. In which case Lola had been the other woman, and Marcia had been wronged.

  Chest on her thighs, Lola stared at a small dust bunny behind her heels. Maybe it was Randy who’d had the midlife crisis and wanted to settle down, have a few kids, be more traditional.

  What if, after she and Randy arrived in Sunshine married, Marcia had wanted to take their clandestine relationship public? Would Randy have divorced Lola if Marcia had said the word? Or had he married Lola to spite Marcia because she wouldn’t marry a younger man? That kind of thing would put a kink in Barbara’s White House plans.

  Lola had too many unanswered questions, more now than before.

  She was falling apart inside. Chunk by chunk, her heart was breaking away. If she discovered one more of Randy’s illusions, one more piece of his past, she’d shatter.

  She sat with her head between her legs for several minutes, feeling nauseated and breathless and more than a bit used. Finally, she recovered enough to look at Marcia’s pictures.

  The first photograph was professionally done, a picture of Barbara sitting and Marcia standing behind her. Marcia’s hands were on Barbara’s shoulders. The neck of Marcia’s baby-blue sweater was decorated with shiny blue beads. Her white-blond hair had a bright-blue streak. She wore the small pearl ear studs and was smiling broadly without a bevy of wrinkles. She could afford Botox when Lola could barely afford new brakes for her car.

  The others were candid shots. Marcia wearing a leather jacket and sitting behind the wheel of an impractical convertible with the top down and zebra glasses on. Marcia in a yoga pose on a ledge beneath the Saddle Horn mountaintop. Marcia wearing an evening gown with cleavage Pris would envy.

  Marcia didn’t just dress like she was in her thirties. She’d lived like she was in her thirties. Emotionally, she and Randy must have been the same age.

  Lola put her head between her legs again.

  When she didn’t feel so light-headed, she shoved everything but Nana’s ring into the blue velvet bag.

  So what if Marcia was hip for her age? That didn’t mean Randy had the right to give her Lola’s ring.

  But why had he given it to Marcia?

  And how was Lola going to keep it from being buried with her?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  By Saturday, Mims had been avoiding the Widows Club board for days.

  First, she’d gone fishing. Hadn’t caught anything.

  Then she’d gone shopping in Greeley. Hadn’t bought anything.

  Finally, she’d gone for a drive but all roads eventually led back to Sunshine. Nothing she tried erased what she’d done.

  The other woman.

  There was a title Mims had never aspired to.

  It played on a loop in her head. Along with thoughts like If only Hamm’s death hadn’t hit me so hard and If only I’d told Charlie that I was fine. Because deep down, Mims had always been strong. It had just felt better to have Charlie’s arms around her and had been so much easier to lean on him when her children and grandchildren were hundreds of miles away.

  But after days of self-loathing, Mims discovered something: clarity. All her grief, all her guilt, it’d bogged down her brain. She watched Jeopardy! and shouted out the questions before the contestants. She felt as if she could play poker and win.

  “I’m back,” she said to herself on Saturday morning, which meant there was work to be done.

  Mims found Wendy at the town library, where she volunteered for a shift one day a week.

  If Mims hadn’t seen it, she would never have guessed that Wendy was the same woman who’d sashayed down the runway a few days ago in a sexy dress with sparkly makeup on her face. Today she wore almost no makeup and a T-shirt with what looked like a finger-painted rainbow across her chest.

  Mims stood at the checkout desk and surveyed the patrons. Unlike other libraries across the country, the Sunshine Valley Library still thrived, most likely because the town was thirty miles from the nearest bookstore.

  Susie Taylor was reading a Curious George book to a circle of children in the cozy corner, her granddaughter, Becky, among them. George Brewer was helping some high school kids with math at a table nearby. Pearl was in the paperback-romance section, wearing her name tag from the Saddle Horn. And Beatrice was carrying a stack of thrillers, most likely to bring back to the retirement home.

  “How are things going with Drew?” Mims asked Wendy in hushed tones.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Wendy placed a stack of books on a cart, l
ooking uncomfortable. “He and I…”

  “You haven’t found common ground,” Mims guessed.

  Wendy nodded, looking relieved. “He talks a lot. Or at least, a lot more than I do.”

  Mims processed her remark in the context of the shy Wendy she’d seen at the Saddle Horn and the glowing Wendy she’d seen at the bake sale and fashion show, and combined it with the confident Wendy she’d encountered at the elementary school. “You need someone a bit more sensitive, don’t you?”

  Wendy, being Wendy, shrugged.

  Mims was more decisive. Wendy needed someone bookish and comfortable with silences. And yet someone who could enjoy the limelight a little and support Wendy when she occasionally stepped into it herself. In hindsight, Drew was totally wrong for Wendy. He was under pressure with Jane’s return, and she’d never seen him spark to Wendy. In fact, there’d been more sparks between him and Lola.

  Mims chuckled.

  Darned if Bitsy hadn’t been right all along. At least when it came to chemistry. With Drew’s worries about child custody and Lola’s obsession with her husband’s paramours, neither one of them was ready for romance. But they could be. With a little help from the Matchmakers Club.

  * * *

  Folks in Sunshine usually greeted Mims with a smile.

  But Lola sat, not smiling, in the same webbed folding chair she’d sat in when she’d been burning her husband’s underwear. Only this time, she was surrounded by opened boxes of clothing, the mounted head of a four-point buck, beer mirrors, a coffee table, and a flimsy sign that read, MOVING SALE.

  “Are you moving?” Mims wandered through the maze of castoffs to reach the young widow.

  “Someday.” Lola watched a car pass slowly by. “For now, Randy is moving out.” She waved a hand toward the house behind her.

  In her front window, a pair of blow-up dolls were involved in a steamy clench. The man wore a black leather jacket, and the woman wore a black nightgown.

  Mims would bet Ramona was having a conniption fit across the street. Her mauve curtains twitched. “Have you had much traffic?” There seemed to be a lot going by, although it was still early.